Whistlejacket
George Stubbs (1724 to 1806) · about 1762
A chestnut Arabian stallion rears up against a plain golden background, larger than life, with no rider, no saddle and no landscape. Whistlejacket was a racehorse owned by the Marquess of Rockingham, twice prime minister of Britain, and Stubbs painted him at the Marquess's estate at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire. The horse won a famous race at York in 1759 and then retired to stud, and this picture was a celebration of him as an animal rather than as a possession.
Stubbs knew horses from the inside. He had spent eighteen months dissecting carcasses in a Lincolnshire farmhouse, hanging them from the rafters and drawing layer by layer, and published the results as The Anatomy of the Horse in 1766. Look at the flaring nostril, the veins under the skin, the rolling eye that seems to notice you, and the exact tension in the hind legs that bear the whole weight. The empty background was almost unheard of at the time, and legend says the horse was so lifelike that Whistlejacket himself reared and tried to attack the picture when it was shown to him.
The canvas stayed at Wentworth Woodhouse for more than two centuries until the National Gallery bought it in 1997, with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It now has a wall to itself and is one of the most photographed works in the building. Whatever the truth of the old stories, the picture does something rare: it gives an animal the scale and dignity that painters usually reserved for kings.
Did You Know? One story claims the plain background was left for another artist to add a portrait of King George the Third on the horse's back, but the Marquess liked it as it was.
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